The joylessness of Google Classroom

When I saw Google Classroom for the first time, my immediate thought was, “This is clearly an under-funded product that ranks fairly low on the list of Google’s priorities.” Our kids use the iPad version and, setting aside the inconvenient fact that it’s at least a few steps behind Google Classroom in the browser, the product as a whole is slow, inelegant and unappealing. It works but just barely, and it lacks nearly every modern user experience affordance commonly found in most contemporary productivity software.

Source: Go read this Adobe designer’s take on why Google Classroom is so joyless – The Verge

Unfortunately, the original article has been taken down. I emailed the author, who simply stated he took it down. At the time I didn’t realize that he was a principal designer for Adobe. I thank him for replying to me, even if I don’t get to share the original article. Hopefully he didn’t get in trouble from Adobe or Google. Valid criticism would make the product better, and Google Classroom would be better because of it.

From the summation in the Verge article, the pulled quotes are definitely true. Classroom’s simplicity is also its biggest negative. It doesn’t take much training to move past what you can do in it.